It would be hard to deny the importance of the “liberal goal of ensuring that all {legally enforceable?} decisions can be formulated and justified in a universally accessible language” (Habermas), or making a “good faith effort” to “maximize the basic goals of liberty and equality between basic beliefs” (Taylor). However, the burden of proof or consent is less on those holding secular beliefs than those who profess more or less fundamentalist beliefs and insist on their right to expect non-believers or “infidels” to shed their agnosticism and conform or convert to the beliefs of the “believers”. The intolerant and destructive implications of such expectations—a form of institutional violence—are shared, unfortunately, by both fundamentalist Christians and the Taliban, although to different degrees.

The appeals to peaceful “co-habitation” (Butler) and “the need for righteous indignation” about the lack of imaginative empathy and compassion (West), in addition to their moral fervor, share the virtue of exhibiting a greater degree of historical specificity and concrete urgency than that invoked by the first two speakers. West also expands the scope of the discussion by transcending religious conflict and addressing issues of economic equality and political responsiveness.

All told, these speakers raised powerful voices in what seems to be an expanding moral vacuum in both developing and developed societies.

I found Judith Butler’s careful use of the thoughts of Arendt, Benjamin, and Said to be a terrifically energizing modeling of and reference to the use of religious reasoning in public life.

Through her proposals of alternate strategies for representing and authorizing Jewish life and ethics by consideration of a diasporic tradition rather than on models of state sovereignty, Professor Butler emphasized the potential contributions of religious thought to the public sphere. Further, the ideas she asked us to consider defied ossification into wholly “religious” or “secular” categories of reason-giving. Instead, they introduce us to the conceptual experiments of three particular late-modern thinkers whose interests were cultural, political and philosophical as well as religious, who “raised a heavy claw” against theological traditions as well as appropriating their insights.

I would like to continue our attention on the manner in which Arendt, despite her critiques of institutional religion and attempts to overcome metaphysics, made recourse to extracted “corals and pearls” of the religious tradition to articulate and authorize her claims. (I have been considering these ideas for my dissertation “Theological Remnants and Renunciations in the Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt.”) Such efforts provide a nice resonance to and within Professor Butler’s proposals.

Such recourse to religious discourse to political effect includes Arendt’s frequent reference of the second genesis creation myth (“male and female created He them”) to depict the givenness of human plurality. Against racist ontologies of the ethnic nationalists (Hitler’s “God the Almighty has made our nation”) she references the myth of Adam, and our common humanity. Arendt insists that the human is not a universal essence, created in the image of sovereign God, and must not be similarly molded into a universal form by the sovereign state. Instead, we are a kind of being that is dynamic, subject to the contingencies of its own action. Augustine articulates as much in his creation story: humans were created “that a beginning be made” (“initium est”). Such stories provided “conditions of possibility” for rethinking political life after totalitarianism, as Arendt noted in her journal in 1950.

Arendt thus appealed to myths that facilitated political life as she understood it (responsive to human plurality, finitude, and capacity for action) to countermand myths that suppressed such an understanding. Jaspers, who insisted (contra Bultmann) on the value of myth for articulating existential truth, that “the Bible is a favorite arena of spiritual contest; another one is provided by the Greek epic poems and tragedies,” was surely proud of his student.

As Professor Butler emphasized, Arendt never appropriated religious tradition wholecloth. It was the contrasting effect of “rich and strange” citations, religious and otherwise, thrown against the hegemonic and stifling logic of the moment, that did her work for her. Yet it was, as I suggest above and as Professor Butler herself modeled, an internal critique of the religious tradition.

In sum, Arendt’s objections to a philosophical-political tradition that she found solipsistic, unable to theorize the human as plural and dynamic, both challenge the Platonic-Christian legacy and sustain certain of its repressed claims. She uncovers hidden claims of humans as created in difference, or ontologically endowed with the capacity to begin, that the tradition has not handed down. Such forms of reason-giving contest the silences of the tradition, its exclusions.

Arendt, though she objected strenuously to both political liberalism and the ills of mixing religion in claims of the nation, surely understood the power of religious stories in public contentions over our efforts to form a political life after the lessons of totalitarianism.

Before discussing the second panel in which the indices of diversity were scheduled to speak, it is worth recalling the various philosophers and fundamentalists conjured up in the first. Neither Taylor nor Habermas saw their prescriptions for liberal citizenship as problematic. Each emphasized the necessity of a liberal, democratic state—Taylor arguing for this, plus human rights, as the essence of secularism, and Habermas connecting it to the neutral public sphere. Vigorous debate could and should exist, they allowed, as long as these debates were somewhat privatized and segregated from public policy, which must apply to all. Such segregation was only problematic for “fundamentalists,” Habermas argued. Meanwhile, Taylor contended that religious practitioners were not unique in needing protection or having particularistic claims. Notably, however, his primary example had to do with Islam (specifically, the somewhat pro forma spectre of the head scarf). In arguing for the unique essence of secularism as “civil religion,” Taylor specifically invoked Rousseau. Despite the historical emergence of secularism as a religious framework, he argued, and despite the historical use of secularism in reference to religion, secularism was not necessarily related to it. Rather, he noted, its essence was comprised of democracy, freedom, and universal human rights. “History has made it the case that the term ‘secularist’ has acquired a referent to religion,” he argued, but origins were not determinative. Striking the chord of progress, Taylor offered a rather prophetic pronouncement about the imminent future, in which secularists might no longer need such a civil religion—or, in fact, any reference to religion at all. Though never specifically conjured, and certainly not intended, the most tangible ghost dredged up with secularism was not Rousseau but Hegel—and not the liberté of civil religion, but the kind on which history’s chopping block is built. I will not rehash here Courtney Bender’s challenge to Taylor’s history of disenchantment, nor the various arguments of Immanent Frame contributors who have connected “human rights” to a new form of imperialism. Rather, I turn to the rest of the performance.

Framed as fantasy (mediator Eduardo Mendieta), as prophecy, and as poetry, the second panel was orchestrated as a religious response to the first. West introduced himself as “a blues man” and opened his rejoinder by summoning Plato. Rather than privatize the poets and segregate their suffering, he preached, philosophers and politicians must recognize their incivility—must acknowledge the “catastrophe” of history that inhered in their promise of progress and neutrality. West’s voice resonated through the Great Hall in which Lincoln (invoked earlier) once spoke. He celebrated the civil rights alliances of Jewish refugees and black Christians, and called in response to Abraham Joshua Heschel, as Butler somewhat did to Said and Arendt. Referencing Palestinian rights but no actual Muslims, both posed a shifting universality of particularism and a liberating ethics of inter-dependence with others not of one’s choosing. This was the only hope of “moving forward,” Butler argued (something she separated from progress histories and Christianity-based narratives of secularization.) Before the curtain fell, the earlier panelists joined Butler and West on stage, and it was Habermas who stole the show. He turned to West in what was either the opening or closing of a dialog, and contended that West had not only argued for the return of prophetic religion, he had “preformed prophetic religion.” At that point, Habermas contented, “all one can do is stand up and change one’s mind” and any further “academic” conversation was pointless. Was this the recognition of a faulty secular/religion, thinking/feeling, universal/particular binary (something West had somewhat maintained), or a subtle second act in secreting academic/public/neutral reason back to an unmarked domain?